[tex-live] TeX Live 2008 testing - problems downloading

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Mon Jun 30 00:53:20 CEST 2008


Norbert Preining writes:
 > On So, 29 Jun 2008, Karl Berry wrote:
 > >     I'm surprised that perl doesn't respect TMPDIR.
 > > 
 > > It's not about perl, it is about our code.  And yes, it should use
 > > TMPDIR rather than hardwiring /tmp.
 > 
 > It should do it ...
 > 
 > code from TLUtils.pm:
 > sub get_system_tmpdir {
 >   my $systmp=0;
 >   $systmp||=getenv 'TMPDIR';
 >   $systmp||=getenv 'TMP';
 >   $systmp||=getenv 'TEMP';
 >   $systmp||='/tmp';
 >   return "$systmp";
 > }
 > 
 > SO it tries first TMPDIR, then TMP, then TEMP, then /tmp ...

Hmm, when I wrote this code I hoped that it is never needed and system
tmp files can be avoided, at least on Windows.  The reason is that
TEMP on Windows contains USERPROFILE.  The latter contains the name of
the user, and last year we got a bug report from a Chinese who had
Chinese characters in USERPROFILE.

The problem is that Perl needs forward slashes as directory separators
and converting \ to / works reliably with ASCII or UTF-8 only.

Hans told me that there is another temp dir on Windows which is
writable by everybody: %SYSTEMROOT%/temp (c:/windows/temp).  This
would avoid the problems but someone has to confirm that it exists and
is writable by everybody on Vista too.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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